HIS 2014 is announced as “the UK conference for sharing information about the key challenges and recent developments in high integrity software engineering. This one day conference will be held in Bristol, UK on 23rd October 2014 and will feature presentations on current industrial experience as well as keynote talks from leading industry experts.”

An interesting program includes keynotes from Martyn Thomas and Harold Thimbleby and a number of international speakers. The talks are grouped into four main sessions:

Languages that use garbage collection pose tricky issues for military system developers. In this recent article COTS journal article, Tucker Taft looks at innovative new parallel programming techniques that offer a safer solution.

I attended last week the 7th edition of the congress on Embedded Real Time Software and Systems that takes place in Toulouse (France) every two years. It started with Joseph Sifakis inviting all of us to work on the integration of embedded systems with Internet, and the Engineering Executive Vice-President of Airbus, Charles Champion, describing the many future challenges of avionics and asking, maybe surprisingly, for simpler software and systems to meet these challenges.

At the software level, I see two important trends contributing to these goals: model-based development and formal methods. The former because it facilitates communication between systems and software engineers, at the right level of abstraction, the latter because it makes the verification of these ever larger and integrated systems tractable thanks to abstraction and automation. No surprise then that both were very much present in presentations at the conference. A difference with previous years was that many of these presentations were backed by large industrial case studies. For example, for model-based development, the use of MBD in the context of DO-178C at Airbus Military, and for formal methods, the use of Event-B for requirements verification at BAE Submarine. The most interesting trend for me was the combination of model-based development and formal methods to manage greater integration between systems. We described such a workflow in our paper on System to Software Integrity. I expect more of these in the next edition.

Another highlight of this conference for me was certification, with two sessions dedicated to New Trends in Certification, among which a majority of papers on formal methods (5 papers). It will be interesting in the years to come to follow progress on the convergence of certification domains on the issues of tool qualification and formal methods.

The Institute for Internet Technologies and Applications at the University of Applied Science in Rapperswil (Switzerland) and AdaCore today announced a significant expansion of the Open Source software model into the domain of high-assurance systems with the preview release of the Muen Separation Kernel. The Muen Kernel enforces a strict and robust isolation of components to shield security-critical functions from vulnerable software running on the same physical system. To achieve the necessary level of trustworthiness, the Muen team used the SPARK language and toolset to formally prove the absence of run-time errors.

The HSR University of Applied Sciences in Switzerland has implemented the TKM from scratch using the Ada programming language. The new Design-by-Contract feature of Ada 2012 has been used for the implementation of state machines, to augment the confidence of operation according to the specification. The TKM works in conjunction with the strongSwan IKEv2 daemon to provide key management services for IPsec.

Sparkel is a new parallel programming language inspired by the SPARK subset of Ada, and designed to support the development of inherently safe and secure, highly parallel applications that can be mapped to multicore, manycore, heterogeneous, or distributed architectures.
To learn more about Sparkel and to follow the project, please visit http://www.sparkel.org

The aim of this booklet is to show how the study of Ada in general, and the features introduced by Ada 2005 and Ada 2012 in particular, can help anyone designing safe and secure software regardless of the programming language in which the software is eventually written. After all, successful implementers of safe and secure software write in the spirit of Ada in any language!